² See, for example, Land and Equity Movement, Land Matters in Displacement, Kampala, CSOPNU, 2004; John Bruce, Drawing a Line Under the Crisis: Reconciling Returnee Land Access and Security in Post-Conflict Rwanda, HPG Working Paper, London, Overseas Development Institute June 2007; odi/hpg research project, land tenure in conflict and post-conflict situations, available at http://odi.org.uk/hpg/land.html. On forced migration emergencies, see Susan F. Martin et al., The Uprooted: Improving Humanitarian Responses to Forced Migration, Oxford, Lexington Books, 2005.Google Scholar

³ See in particular Finn Stepputat, ‘Repatriation and Everyday Forms of State Formation in Guatemala’, in Richard Black and Khaled Koser (eds), The End of the Refugee Cycle?, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1999, pp. 210–26.Google Scholar

⁴ Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York, Telos Press Publishing, 2006, first published 1950.Google Scholar

⁵ Rasch, William, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt and the New World Order’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 104: 2 (2005), p. 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991; and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.Google Scholar

⁷ On the basis of nomos it would be interesting to explore how the foundation of the international refugee and human rights regime after the two World Wars was influenced by an international system which, in Schmitt's interpretation, was characterized by the ascending American dominion and the disintegration of the international law of jus publicus Europaeum that had kept some kind of order in Europe for three centuries. But this is beyond the aim of this articleGoogle Scholar

⁸ Schmitt, The Nomos, p. 48.Google Scholar

⁹ Surin, Kenneth, ‘World Ordering’, South Atlantic Journal, 104: 2 (2005), pp. 185–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico. A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 56.Google Scholar

¹¹ Rønsbo, Henrik, ‘State Formation and Property. Reflections on the Political Technologies of Space in Central America’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10: 1 (1997), pp. 56–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² See in particular J. C. Cambranes (ed.), 500 Años de Lucha por la Tierra, Guatemala, FLACSO, 1985; and David McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760–1940, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar

¹³ Rosalinda Hernandez Alarcón, ¿A quién servira el catastro? Las dificultades para convertir el censo territorial en un recurso para atender la añeja demanda de tierra en Guatemala, Guatemala, Inforpress, 1998.Google Scholar

¹⁴ The concept of fincas de mozos refers to private estates in the highland that were not productive in terms other than providing workforce for coffee plantations at the lower altitudes. See McGreery, Rural Guatemala.Google Scholar

¹⁵ San Mateo, San Sebastián, San Rafael and Jacaltenango. It may be argued that the effect of reform was often more radical in terms of depriving highland communities of their access to a diverse range of ecological niches of production than in terms of taking land away from them.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Rønsbo, ‘State Formation and Property’.Google Scholar

¹⁷ From a petition for land credit to FONAPAZ from the communities of Guaxacaná and Trinidad, March 1995. UNHCR archive, Nentón.Google Scholar

¹⁸ As such, the return programme became a pilot project for the later implementation of a market-based land reform in other areas of Guatemala, in particular the Petén. See Liza Grandia, ‘Unsettling: Recurring Dispossessions of the Q'eqchi' Maya and New Frontiers of Enclosure’, manuscript under review. 2007.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See for example Craib, Cartographic Mexico; and Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar

²⁰ Acuerdo Final, 19 September 1994.Google Scholar

²¹ It should be mentioned also that the government of Guatemala had a particular interest in this return because it was the first made by a group that had separated from the left-leaning anti-statist organization of refugees, the Permanent Commissions, who had negotiated the accord on return.Google Scholar

²² See Redfield, Robert, ‘Primitive Merchants of Guatemala’, Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Relations, 1: 4 (1939), pp. 42–56.Google Scholar See also Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in D. N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel. On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings, Chicago, Chicago University Press 1971, pp. 143–9.

²³ As suggested by Jan de Vos, Las Fronteras de la Frontera Sur. Reseña de los proyectos de expansion que figuraron la frontera entre Mexico y Centroamerica, Villahermosa, Mexico, Universidad Juarez Autónoma de Tabasco, 1993.Google Scholar

²⁴ As Anderson noted, shapes of national territories have become icons of the nation-states, but in this case it could be the other way round. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso, 1983.Google Scholar

²⁵ The lack of confidence in the methods and intentions behind the fixing of the border resulted in Guatemalan complaints of having lost much more territory and population than the Mexicans due to a misinterpretation of the names of the rivers in the Petén. It took 13 years of renegotiations before the issue was finally settled in 1895.Google Scholar

²⁶ Craib, Cartographic Mexico, p. 107.Google Scholar

²⁷ Craib, Cartographic Mexico.Google Scholar

²⁸ As members of Jehovah's Witness they were entirely against the use of violence and had successfully resisted the demand to organize a civil patrol.Google Scholar

²⁹ For example, Yoltún has no electricity yet, despite the fact that the infrastructure has been installed. But the mozos colonos are in control of the supply line running through their village, and the returnees have not been able to deliver on their economic demands.Google Scholar

³⁰ Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos, p. 48.Google Scholar